Researchers Peter Kim and Garrett Gee did this by buying 30 internet domains they thought people would send emails to by accident (a practice known as typosquatting).

The domain names they chose were all identical to subdomains used by Fortune 500 companies save for a missing dot.

Having purchased the domains they simply sat back and watched as users mistakenly sent them over 120,000 emails in six months.

 FACTS:

The media is buzzing with stories of state-sponsored hacking and so-called advanced persistent threats, as well as high-profile data-theft attacks by cybercriminals. So what does this mean to everyday businesses owners and managers, companies that aren’t defense contractors or giant corporations?

It means watch out. The wildly successful techniques used in state-sponsored attacks are moving down a malware adoption lifecycle. Yesterday’s million-dollar, well-planned, high-profile attack quickly becomes a $25 exploit kit available online to armies of low-level hackers.

The Websense Security Labs™ are recognized worldwide for their threat expertise and research on the latest trends and exploits on the wild Web. Recently, the Security Labs began their Video Diary series, a quick look at what they are working or what's hot in security research for that week. These quick insights can be found every week at the Security Labs home page. Archived episodes can be found by clicking on the video player and scrolling across the bottom.

Last Sunday evening the websites of Vodafone, Betfair, Acer, National Geographic, the Telegraph and the Register all fell victim to a hacking attack.  This was the work of a Turkish hacker group called TurkGuvenligi, who diverted traffic from these sites to a new holding page announcing “TurkGuvenligi declare this day as World Hackers Day - Have fun ;) h4ck y0u”